


Lingering

by orphan_account



Category: Hikaru no Go
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 14:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Torajirou speaks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lingering

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://uchikomi.dreamwidth.org/10611.html) for Hikago Deathmatch 2012.

  
That you did not miss the wind, or long for the earth beneath your sandals; that you never spoke of new rice, or plum wine, or fire or cold or wet; that for you the chrysanthemum was scentless, the rose-thorn painless--! These are things I think of only now, when no questions can be asked, no apologies tendered, and the only answers the ones I give myself.  
  


*****

  
  
He manifests your soul. So did I, in those long and beloved years, the years where I loved you and you loved the game. In those days your anger was fire in my veins. Your sorrow was tears on my pillow, your fear bile in my throat.  
  
Your desire was my desire.  
  
Today you close your heart that he may not feel your pain. Beloved, should I be pleased? It was never in you to be considerate, and yet you have learned somehow, for him. A gift you never gave me.  
  
But it is because you were selfish that I know you best of all, irrevocably and beyond time; a scar in my soul, perhaps, that lasts from one life to the next.  
  


*****

  
  
You do not believe in the afterlife. A strange opinion considering the circumstances.  
  


*****

  
  
A thousand years of lingering means this: a distillation of desire, the resection of the soul's unnecessary parts. You are less with him than you were with me, and less with me than the one who walked the emperor's court, braved the currents of the river.  
  
When you are whole again, who knows? Perhaps I will not love you, and surely you will not need me; that you might love me, even faintly, even as a glimmer, in the way you love him; is, perhaps, not worthy as a hope. For that is not how I wished to be loved.  
  


*****

  
  
I would not take back a single day, a single game, you borrowed from me.  
  


*****

  
  
And after all I remain jealous, for he has what I had, and what I had not. But the hourglass tips and the sand flows down surely; the wheels of time turn and the soul returns to the path of all the quick and dead.  
  
You will hear my voice and he will lose yours; you will taste tears, breathe wind, feel hunger, know pain.  
  
The unasked questions will be asked. And I will know you for the first time.


End file.
